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If you're not federated with them your instance is going to be a ghost town. I think it'll be hard to run an independent instance with enough activity on its ow

If you're not federated with them your instance is going to be a ghost town. I think it'll be hard to run an independent instance with enough activity on its own to be worth joining unless you have some external source of community/fandom to keep fresh streams of users coming in to manage churn. The largest community Discords, for example, tend to be around YouTubers, streamers, podcasters, etc. where they build the community around their content and fanbase. This was also the way the big PHP forums used to go.

WorldMaker 4y ago
People used to love the relative calm of the small PHP (and Perl) forums. For some of us in the early internet the big forums were toxic place to generally be avoided. You can have a wonderful time on a tiny instance that only federates with mostly other tiny instances and never sees the biggest instances. Mastodon doesn't need to be Twitter where you "must" follow celebrities of any sort or streamers/podcasters/YouTubers/Influencers. People claiming that Mastodon is terrible because it isn't focused solely on massive instances with maximal "reach" are missing the point: that is a *feature* and not a bug. People have forgotten the early days of Twitter when it was mostly about following real life friends, or conference acquaintances. There's a usefulness to quieter, stiller social media. It's great to have tiny instances with tiny follow streams.